


All That Remains

by ncfan



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rise of Empire Era - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion with Star Wars: Rise of the Empire Era, Angst, Character Death, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Death, Gen, M/M, Post-Order 66, Post-Revenge of the Sith, Pre-A New Hope, Slash, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, allusions to torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-19 11:22:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4744442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What they did, ten years after the Order fell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All That Remains

**Author's Note:**

> "So, because I’ve been on a huge sci-fi kick, lately, and inspiration came knocking (on top of the other sci-fi au idea I have, and that one’s properly fic, too, not this unholy mess of fic and not!fic; I’ve just got to finish outlining it), here is the horrible exorcists Star Wars AU that no one asked for. It got much, much longer than I ever expected it to, and is more fic now than the not!fic I’d envisioned before. Also, characterization is… weird. Partly because of how incredibly AU this is and partly because, I dunno, I fail at writing human interaction half of the time. I hope you like it anyways.
> 
> "(And as for the identities of Natori and Matoba’s Jedi masters, I wanted to go with characters who were canonical to Natsume Yuujinchou, and I couldn’t choose parents, since Jedi aren’t usually permitted to have children, and probably wouldn’t be allowed to teach them even if they were. With that in mind, Takuma and Nanase were the best fits.)"
> 
> So I decided that I would post this here as well as Tumblr. I'm always a little wary of the permanence of Tumblr and am a little more confident of nothing getting lost on AO3. I also decided that I put too much time and effort into this not to post it to one of the fanfiction sites I'm affiliated with. Warnings for allusions to torture--nothing graphic, but if that squicks or triggers you, I just wanted you to have the warning.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Natori Shuuichi and Matoba Seiji were part of the same youngling clan in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant in the days of the Clone Wars. When it came time for them to be apprenticed to a single master instead of learning under Master Yoda with the rest of the initiates, they went their separate ways, as was so often the case for Padawans, and especially during the days of the Clone Wars.

Shuuichi’s master, Takuma Yosuke, had been a well-respected Jedi Knight once upon a time, but had fallen out of favor with the Council after _very_ publicly denouncing their willingness to send even the youngest of Padawans into the war zone as the Clone Wars wore on, marking it as a sign that the Jedi Order had become too beholden to the wishes of the Senate. Takuma had not intended to take on an apprentice until after the war was over, but he respected the will of the Force. That said, he rarely allowed Shuuichi to take the field, and when Shuuichi was on the field with him, Takuma hovered over him so much that he was exposed to anything seriously dangerous, and if he was, Takuma was usually right there to push him back from the front lines.

Seiji’s master, Nanase, was an older human, as far as Jedi (who rarely lived out the full life expectancy for their species) were concerned. She was a bit less inclined to shelter her apprentice than Takuma was his, though taking Seiji’s age into account, she never allowed him to take part in pitched battles unless she thought he would be safer by her side.

They were, like all Padawans and initiates their age, children of the war, their lessons focusing far more on lightsaber combat and military strategy than the more peaceful pursuits of the Jedi. In one year of experience in the Clone Wars, even kept away from the front lines as they were, they both saw more combat than Padawans before the war had seen in five, or even ten. Shuuichi and Seiji both would likely have had enough difficulty adjusting to a post-war galaxy if the Jedi Order had stood intact at the end. But that was not to be.

-0-0-0-

Shuuichi had been told to run, and however much he might have wanted to fight, the galaxy seemed to be falling apart all around him. Clone troopers were attacking their Jedi commanders, the rips and tears made in the Force by the screams and moans of the dying, the Dark Side, which had been steadily growing without end for the past few months now, suddenly billowing like a sudden storm cloud on Coruscant, and all the time the bastions of the Light (Jedi Masters, the Temple on Coruscant and all the outposts on other worlds) were winking out like candles burned too low. The galaxy was on fire, and darkness was descending to put out the light, so for once, when Takuma told him to run, he ran.

(There was no scream behind him as he fled. There was the shriek of blaster fire, and the thump of something heavy hitting the ground. Shuuichi imagined, sometimes, what it must have looked like, but it was all supposition, for he’d never turned back to look. He never knew whether to be grateful for that or not.)

The next few weeks went by in a terrified haze. The war was over and the Separatists vanquished, but the Order had fallen, branded traitors and marked for death. The Republic had fallen, and rising in its place was an Empire where the Dark Side of the Force was absolute. Shuuichi stowed away on various ships, trying to get as far from the Core as he could—he didn’t dare return to Coruscant, not to where he knew the new Emperor’s forces would be at their strongest.

He had thought to look for other survivors of the Purge; surely he couldn’t be the only one. And indeed, Shuuichi was not the only survivor of the Purge, but whatever news he received was tainted with death. He heard tell of the massacre on Kessel from listening to the navigator of the ship he was hiding on at the time. News of the deaths of several Jedi on Naboo was relayed by a gleeful Imperial HoloVision report. Shuuichi mourned in private, learning quickly and bitterly that any overt expression of grief at news reports about traitors’ deaths would earn him far too much attention.

No, there was never any good news. Shuuichi spent about a year looking for it, dodging blaster fire and fleeing the swarms of stormtrooopers that inevitably descended on him when he pulled out his lightsaber to deflect. But as any news of Jedi descended from HoloVision-worthy to rumors passed by drunk traders in spaceports, as Jedi descended precipitously from fact and memory to half-baked legends and boogeymen parents frightened young children with ( _How could this all possibly have happened so soon?_ ), as it became clearer and clearer to Shuuichi that he was alone, he bowed his head to necessity.

A Core Worlds accent stuck out like a sore thumb in the Outer Rim, so Shuuichi pushed it down, learned to mimic the sharp twangs, harsh syllables and strident enunciations of the Outer Rim Territories until he sounded no different from the traders, smugglers and dissidents he was constantly surrounded with—like someone from nowhere in particular. He told anyone who cared to ask that he was from Ammuud; the planet had a large human population and had seen an influx of refugees during the Clone Wars, so no one would think twice of the fact that his name didn’t match the names of anyone they might have known from the planet.

Away went his lightsaber, not thrown away, but hidden among his few belongings. Shuuichi picked up the finer points of shooting blasters from a grizzled Corellian trader who didn’t know who he was and had taken a liking to his new crewman. He didn’t use the Force in fights beyond the training that would have come automatically to him, no matter how he tried to suppress it—sensing where his opponents would go next, sensing where the next wave of blaster fire would come from. He didn’t use the Force outside of fights at all, not even to summon supplies from the other side of the room when he was repairing something. If he forgot himself at any time, he could—probably _would_ —end up paying for it with his life.

Fear, anger and shame were his constant companions now. Fear of capture, and what would become of him if he was captured. Anger at the state of the galaxy and what had been done to the Order. Shame at the idea of what any Jedi would have said, if they could see him now. Natori Shuuichi was no Jedi anymore.

He latched on to smuggling crews, people and ships who rarely stayed on the same planet or in the same sector for too long. They ran the gamut of sapient nature; some were good people, some bad (some worse than Shuuichi had initially thought them to be), but mostly, they were just people like most everyone he had known once the war was over. A lot of them were just trying to get by, maybe do a bit of good here and there, and if they had to cut corners or throw someone else under the bus to do it, they treated it as an acceptable cost. Altruism was a rare commodity to be found under the heel of the Empire, and acts of kindness could be costly. It was a bitter pill, but one Shuuichi had swallowed, nonetheless.

Those crews, those people he knew, all knew the same person. A young human who pivoted between surliness and melancholy, with apathy to most things being the occasional middle ground. Dependable in a fire fight and when the ship needed repairs, but not terribly personable. But then again, there were plenty of people who didn’t have too many reasons to smile, in this day and age.

-0-0-0-

For Seiji, the darkness that had so suffused the Force was something to tip his head up in defiance against. A Jedi he would be until death, whether or not there was any Jedi Order left to be a part of, even if the Jedi had been betrayed. There was no way to honor the dead except by remembering their teachings and carrying on what he had learned to them. No matter how long the night, the morning would surely come. At least, that was what Seiji had been taught.

He never gave up any of the teachings of the Jedi—the most Seiji had done to hide himself from Imperial eyes was cut away his Padawan braid, and that had felt like enough of a betrayal that Seiji would have been happy to die with his lightsaber clutched in his hands just to keep from feeling like that again. It was a decision that cost him dearly, in many ways, but he would not hide who he was.

Solitude was Seiji’s constant companion, then. He found work with multiple traders and smugglers over the years, but someone who drew a lightsaber at the first blaster bolt fired attracted far too much attention from the Imperials, and generally, it wasn’t long before he was told to find someone else to take him on. Aside from the momentary prick of resentment, he couldn’t really blame them. The Empire liked to make examples of people caught or even suspected of harboring Jedi, and the Empire was at the best of times short on mercy. He hoarded money, hoarded food, never sure of when he’d run out of a steady supply of both.

The only news he ever had about other Jedi was news of executions and stamped-out ‘insurgencies.’ Sometimes, he would catch a glimpse of an Inquisitor on HoloVision and see something familiar in their features, but they weren’t Jedi anymore. They were dead in their own way (His stomach still lurched when he saw them).

Where once he would have sensed the rest of the Jedi with even the slightest foray into the Force, if he reached out, he felt nothing. In the Force, there was once light, and life, and noise. Stretch out your mind, and you would feel someone reaching back for you. But now, there was none of that. The Force was as a starless night. The darkness, Seiji expected. The silence? The silence was something else. (Except for when he delved too deep, and he could hear the echoes of the Purge. Even the silence, at its most overwhelming, was preferable to that.)

After a while, he stopped expecting to hear anything. He stopped expecting to find any other survivors. If he was alone, he would simply have to accept it, and try to carry on by himself.

(There was little Seiji wouldn’t have given for meditation to stop feeling like sitting alone in a tomb, though.)

-0-0-0-

**9 BBY (Nine years before the Battle of Yavin), Outer Rim Territories, Socorro:**

Shuuichi would be lying if he said he was particularly enjoying his stay on Socorro. It wasn’t the fact that the whole planet was one big smuggler’s haven. Shuuichi himself had been a smuggler for quite a while, though the smuggling he did was usually for ‘the greater good’ (whatever _that_ meant) and not for his own profit; either way, there was a good chance he’d get struck down for hypocrisy if he criticized smugglers for their craft.

It wasn’t the weather that he disliked, either, though Socorro, for its wicked heat, was hardly a hospitable planet. What he disliked was the tugging at the back of his mind, the prick of memory, the faint whispers of the Force. Before the end of the war, the Order had had an outpost here, where Jedi were trained as Guardians, and though that outpost had been razed from the surface of Socorro a decade prior, it still stood in the Force. But somehow, more disquieting than that was the fact that the name of the youngling clan Shuuichi had belonged to before becoming a Padawan was taken from an animal native to this world, the tra’cor.

But the mission would be over soon, and they would leave Socorro. Seven months ago, Shuuichi had fallen in with a new ship, _The Jewel of Iridonia_ by name, and a new crew of smugglers, captained by a tiny, taciturn Zabrak named Hiiragi, who among other quirks of personality wore a full facial mask at all times. Hiiragi had a contact who directed them to supplies and to planets that needed them and weren’t getting what they needed from the Empire (So, pretty much every inhabited world in the Outer Rim, one way or another). The only problem was getting the supplies _out_ of the hands of the Empire, which was easier said than done. However, Shuuichi’s only job this time was standing watch outside of the Imperial warehouse while Kal, the Bothan who served as primary engineer and Rina, a Kiffar refugee who’d thrown in with the crew around the same time as Shuuichi, got the crates out. Shuuichi might not use the Force actively anymore, but he could still sense when the stormtrooopers were about to round the corner and see an unscheduled ‘transfer.’

 _Here’s hoping Rina didn’t miss any of the sensors. I can’t help them about a silent alarm, and Sephora’d kill us all if we brought ‘unexpected company’ back to the checkpoint._ The Empire had only a small presence on Socorro, but still more than enough to swamp them if they didn’t manage get out of town undetected.

Shuuichi felt the faint tugging on the edge of his awareness that he’d been experiencing ever since they made landing grow stronger. He tried to throw it off, annoyed. This planet resonated strongly with the Force, might have still done so even if the Jedi _hadn’t_ had a centuries-old Academy here. Shuuichi would occasionally hear voices on the dry wind that blew ever over the black dunes. He saw shadows in the ruddy sky that sometimes looked familiar to his eyes. This planet was dredging up old memories. Shuuichi would be glad when they finally left.

A swish of movement caught Shuuichi’s eye. A few patrons were emerging from a nearby cantina—a Rodian, a few Imperial officers (who skulked away, doubtless afraid to be caught drinking on the job by a superior), and behind them, a young human man who paused at the doorway, blinking the sun out of his eyes.

Shuuichi frowned at him. He was a thin, almost scrawny man with a narrow, slightly pointed face, wearing the same tough-looking, utilitarian clothes you saw most Outer Rim drifters wearing. He had long black hair tied back at the base of his neck, though his fringe fell long over the right side of his face, obscuring it from view. The man had a sharp, watchful air about him, even as he mopped his brow and sighed, looking around.

The tugging sensation at the back of Shuuichi’s mind grew stronger still. At the same time, he realized that there was something familiar about the man’s features. Something about his face, the glint of his visible eye, the way he carried himself, made him seem like someone Shuuichi had known once. _Very_ much like someone Shuuichi had known once.

Then, their eyes met.

_…It can’t be…_

“Shuuichi,” Seiji said faintly, staring disbelievingly at him. He stretched out a hand, reaching or beckoning, Shuuichi couldn’t have guessed.

His heart in his throat, Shuuichi took a step forward, but before he could say anything, an ear-splittingly loud claxon went off in the warehouse.

Kal and Rina barreled out of the side entrance, pushing the levitating crates as fast as they could and began latching them to their waiting speeders. “Did you miss a sensor?” Shuuichi asked Rina, peering down the alleyways, trying to catch sight of security. The claxon had put everyone in the vicinity on edge; he couldn’t sense more focused Imperial security forces over all of that, not anymore.

“Obviously,” Rina snapped. She looked over Shuuichi’s shoulder and frowned suspiciously, resting her hand on top of her holstered blaster. “Who’s this?” she demanded, nodding at Seiji and narrowing her eyes.

“Oh, well, he’s…” Shuuichi gestured helplessly at Seiji, at a total loss for what to say. He felt for a moment as though the last ten years had melted away and the galaxy hadn’t yet gone mad. “He’s an old…”

Seiji stepped out from behind him, and nodded briskly at Rina. “My name is Matoba Seiji—surname, _then_ given name,” he added, in the sort of irritated tone that spoke of having the two confused often over the course of his life (Shuuichi could relate). “I am acquainted of old with Shuuichi.” He smiled coolly, a smile totally unlike the sort Shuuichi remembered him wearing as a child. “And you are?”

“Rina Nafar. You looking for work?”

“Are you offering?”

“Help us get these crates back to our ship and my answer is ‘yes.’”

“I—“ Shuuichi tried to speak, but before he could get another word out, there came shouting from one of the alleys.

“Hey, you!” About half a dozen stormtrooopers were rounding the corner, rifles drawn and ready to fire. “Drop those crates!”

Wasn’t _that_ always the way?

Shuuichi discovered two things in the ensuing firefight. One, Seiji was now handling his lightsaber left-handed, for reasons Shuuichi wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Two, Seiji wore a length of white cloth with strange markings on it over his right eye, for reasons Shuuichi was even less sure he wanted to know.

He still fought with his lightsaber. Even after ten years that he had no doubt spent being hunted down by the Empire, planet-hopping with alarming frequency, Seiji still fought with a lightsaber, instead of a blaster, a vibroblade or anything else. Shuuichi had discarded everything about himself from his days as a Jedi short of his name and his lightsaber (stowed away on _The Jewel_ as it might have been), and on top of still being alive, Seiji still looked, walked, talked and fought like a Jedi out of one of the old tales they’d learned as initiates in the Temple. Shuuichi started to wonder when _The Jewel_ was going to make another rocky drop out of hyperspace and he’d be wrenched out of this particularly painful dream.

It wasn’t a dream. Somehow, the past had finally caught up with the present. The moment was far less momentous than Shuuichi had imagined it would be, and yet, as they all made their escape, it occurred to him that he didn’t feel nearly as happy as he should have. Then again, Shuuichi couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt happy for more than a few minutes at a time—it usually got drowned out by irritation or the peril of the moment. That might have been it.

-0-0-0-

Seiji was by now used to getting swept up in new jobs unexpectedly (he supposed he should be grateful to the Force for small favors), though he’d not expected to find work so soon after getting kicked off the last ship he’d been serving on. Usually the tale went that he found work again just before or after running out of his last bit of money (Well, except for that one time when he’d been forced to resort to stealing food from unsuspecting vendors for about a month). The people he ended up with would almost inevitably be the sort of people he it was better not to fall asleep in front of. They would eventually decide that keeping a Jedi around wasn’t worth the risk, kick him off their ship, and the cycle started again (The Force did seem to love cycles). But this time, he’d gotten more work and been accepted onto a ship—though not without some questioning from the captain, who apparently had _not_ authorized her crew to go scoping out new crewmen—less than a standard week after having last found himself out of work.

Then again, there was more that had come to him unexpectedly than just finding work sooner than usual.

He hadn’t expected to see another Jedi again. If there were other survivors, well, it was a big galaxy and they were no doubt trying to hide themselves. Maybe there were no other survivors, and it was just him. But today he had practically tripped over another Jedi survivor, and it wasn’t a stranger, someone he’d never known, but a childhood companion, a friend. (He was not supposed to be unduly attached to any one person; Seiji knew that. But a familiar face in amongst the wreckage was more than he had ever dreamed of.)

Shuuichi wasn’t the same as Seiji remembered him, though. He was still just as prickly as he had been as an initiate and a young Padawan, but asides from that and the physical likenesses time could not erase, he was barely recognizable as Natori Shuuichi of ten years ago. He carried a blaster instead of a lightsaber, having traded away the elegant and the civilized for the brutish and the imprecise. He didn’t walk or talk or hold himself like a Jedi; he was far more furtive than that, seemed more like the rough combination of desolate planets, hard knocks and harder living that characterized so many in the Outer Rim. And as for the impression Shuuichi left in the Force, it was as though he’d reverted to the font of unrealized potential he had been as a very young initiate, someone who stumbled through the Force without really perceiving it.

Were other survivors, if there were any, like this too?

_What have I been—_

Seiji pushed the thought away. Better simply to be happy that he had found another survivor at all.

Aside from Shuuichi, the ship was home to its captain, a female Zabrak named Hiiragi who, rather bizarrely, wore a full face mask with a single eye and a smiling mouth painted on it, a male Bothan named Kal, a female Kiffar named Rina, a female Mirialan named Sephora and two droids. Seiji had been told to bunk with Shuuichi, since the latter was apparently the only one who had a cabin with a spare bed. Seiji stood in the doorway of that cabin, peering inside with a frown on his face.

Shuuichi sat on the floor in front of the bunks, taking apart what looked like a communications device with an expression of extreme concentration. He didn’t notice Seiji watching him, which Seiji took as a further sign of just how long he had gone without living by the creed of the Jedi. Even when focused on a demanding task, a Jedi keeping up with his training would have been able to sense Seiji standing in the same room as them, watching them. But Seiji didn’t alert Shuuichi to his presence, didn’t say or do anything. He just stood there, watching, trying to reconcile the boy he had known with the young man he knew now, trying to guess if there was anything more about Shuuichi that was the same as it had been besides his tendency for prickliness.

Eventually, Shuuichi realized that there was someone else standing in the doorway (Maybe he had finally paid heed to the Force, or he’d just noticed the shadow falling over him). Neither of them said anything. Shuuichi’s gaze strayed to the right side of Seiji’s face—the look in his eyes was one of curiosity, but from the way his jaw clenched at the sight of Seiji’s eyepatch, it looked like Shuuichi might not have really wanted to know why. Seiji brushed his hair back down over the eyepatch and smirked bitterly.

“You… should try taking up a blaster,” Shuuichi said awkwardly, his eyes straying to Seiji’s lightsaber, highly visible now that he’d taken off his jacket. He even sounded different.

Seiji frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. “ _I_ will fight with the weapon of the Jedi.”

Shuuichi’s shoulders stiffened. He stared at the wall to his left and, jaw still clenched, muttered, “Suit yourself. Draw all their fire if it pleases you.”

Silence sprung up between them again, broken only by the hum of the ship’s engines and the air filtration system. Shuuichi continued to stare at the wall, and Seiji stared at him, reflecting as he did so that this wasn’t the way reunions after ten years of absence were supposed to go. _We ought to be happier than this, shouldn’t we?_ He tilted his head to one side so he could get a better look at Shuuichi, and asked quietly, “Do you still have your lightsaber?”

“Yeah.”

At least he had not thrown that much of himself away. “How long has it—“

“About nine years. Give or take a month.”

“I see.” Seiji paused, trying to think of a way to put into words what he wanted, in a way that wouldn’t immediately make Shuuichi balk. “Would you mind a good spar, then? It’s been years since I last had anyone to spar against.”

Shuuichi’s brow furrowed dubiously. “I don’t think—“

“Surely if you were willing to adopt a blaster as being more practical in some situations, you must concede that a lightsaber is more practical in others.” Seiji’s mouth curved up in a habitual smile. “You don’t want to be caught flat-footed, do you?”

The dubious look did not fade from Shuuichi’s face even slightly; if anything, it deepened. In childhood, he had been an open book in mind, his emotions easily picked up on even if he didn’t express them openly. Now, though, Shuuichi didn’t broadcast at all if his emotions didn’t show up on his face. Either his mental shields had grown stronger and less porous in the past decade, or Seiji simply wasn’t any good at deep-reading him anymore. He preferred to believe the former.

But when Shuuichi finally spoke, it was with a nod and a muttered, “Sure, sure. There should be enough room in the cargo hold. Just let me finish with this—“ he gestured at the communications device “—first. Hiiragi wants this done soon so we’ll be ready when we drop out of hyperspace; it’s a jammer.”

Seiji’s eyebrows shot up. “I’ve been meaning to ask about that, actually. Do you do this sort of thing often?”

Shuuichi snorted. “We’re pretty much professional blockade runners. Anything to get one back at the Empire.”

“Hmm.”

“Now let me finish this, alright?”

Seiji nodded, his stomach churning for some reason he couldn’t quite tell—reminiscence, maybe. “Alright.”

-0-0-0-

Certain bits of knowledge were so ingrained in Shuuichi’s mind that he couldn’t possibly have forgotten them, no matter how he might have tried. The correct grip for the lightsaber, how to set it so that if the blade made contact with his opponent’s body it would sting instead of burn or more seriously injure. Form I, the form of lightsaber combat taught to all Jedi younglings, was far more vivid in memory for Shuuichi than was Form III, which Takuma had been trying to teach him before he died, so he used Form I instead. The clash of lightsaber blades, his green against Seiji’s blue, the sharp hissing noise of two blades striking one another, that was familiar.

Shuuichi had expected the match to be more even than it was. He’d not used his lightsaber for nine years, but then, Seiji hadn’t used his for anything but deflecting blaster bolts for the same amount of time, and he fought with his weak hand, _and_ that eyepatch had to screw with his depth perception.

But the match was over in about ten seconds, with Seiji’s lightsaber at the side of Shuuichi’s neck and Shuuichi’s own lightsaber knocked clean to the other side of the cargo hold.

The look in Seiji’s eye was too clinical for comfort—like a child contemplating stomping on an insect skittering on the ground in front of them—and Shuuichi hastily said, “I yield!”

Seiji drew a deep breath and deactivated his lightsaber, that overly cool, detached look fading from his face. He clipped his lightsaber back onto his belt and started to leave. As Seiji neared the door, he stopped and turned back so that Shuuichi could see the left side of his face. “You are quite… out of practice,” he commented. Something like disappointment flitted through Seiji’s voice, before vanishing. He reached out his left hand, and Shuuichi’s fallen lightsaber leapt off the ground and came to rest on Seiji’s upturned palm. He tossed the hilt of the saber to Shuuichi with significantly less accuracy. While Shuuichi was floundering for it, Seiji left the room.

Alone, Shuuichi stared down at the hilt of his lightsaber, that old, worn thing. “ _This weapon is your life_ ,” Takuma, Yoda, and the droid Huyang who had assisted him and other younglings in building their lightsabers had all assured him at different points. His closest ally it should have been, but it had nearly been his undoing at times, nearly cost him everything just to still carry on him. Even when he didn’t use it, his lightsaber had still been a liability.

Seiji’s bladework was still as elegant as it had been ten years ago— _he_ certainly had not even contemplated hiding or discarding his lightsaber—but Shuuichi wondered what the price for that had been. (He wondered, at the same time, just what the price had been for him to keep that part of himself hidden away.)

-0-0-0-

Of course, the results of the next sparring match weren’t any better. Nor were the results of the next one after that, or the next after that.

The days and weeks had passed by as they always seemed to—there were bits of action interspersed with long periods of doing nothing or becoming increasingly nervous of being caught until even Shuuichi, who tried not to use the Force at all, started to get headaches from the concentrated nervousness of his shipmates (Seiji seemed unaffected. Lucky.). Shuuichi supposed that those long periods of having nothing to do were the reason he’d kept agreeing to sparring matches with Seiji. When there wasn’t anything on _The Jewel_ that needed fixing, there just wasn’t anything to do. They didn’t have any vids—Sephora had some holobooks but she guarded those pretty closely and didn’t allow anyone else to read them. The ship had a dejarik table, but Shuuichi didn’t play dejarik and Sephora and Rina had been monopolizing it for a while anyways. Kal spent most of the transit time in his cabin; occasionally they’d hear him singing. Before Seiji had showed up, Shuuichi usually spent times like this sitting up in the cockpit with Hiiragi (who rarely tried to make anyone talk if they didn’t want to) or in his cabin trying to get some sleep. At least this was something of a change of pace.

But it turned out that that change of pace was mostly one that went from apathy to complete frustration. The average time length of a sparring match between two Jedi of roughly equal skill levels was roughly thirty standard seconds, and since the Jedi were of equal skill levels, the outcome could go either way. Shuuichi, however, could not seem to win a single sparring match against Seiji; even when it seemed momentarily as though he might emerge victorious, Seiji slipped out of the clutches of defeat with seemingly no trouble at all. To be honest, Shuuichi didn’t mind spending time with Seiji, but this was starting to wear.

It didn’t help that whatever form Seiji was using, it wasn’t one Shuuichi was familiar with. Masters of various forms of lightsaber combat had periodically demonstrated the moves, opening stances and so on of each form to the initiates (Master Windu’s demonstration of Vaapad had been the highlight of the year for the Tra’cor clan). What little Shuuichi remembered of those forms didn’t jive with the way Seiji fought. It might have had something to do with the eyepatch (He generally found it easier to think of that in terms of ‘the eyepatch’, instead of Seiji having apparently lost an eye at some point, especially since Seiji himself had yet to confirm that his right eye was actually gone). But the form Seiji used was strange, and it was tripping Shuuichi up.

“You’re lucky I’m not fighting to kill you,” Seiji remarked after yet another sparring match, smiling sharply. “You’d be in a great deal of trouble if I were.”

“Don’t talk tough, Seiji,” Shuuichi retorted, glaring back at him. “An Inquisitor’d make mincemeat out of us both, and you know it.”

Seiji stiffened at that. Shuuichi watched, concern abruptly taking the place of frustration, as Seiji ran his fingertips over the white cloth of his eyepatch, then sighed deeply, nostrils flaring, and brushed his hair back down over it. The look on his face was composed—he acted as though it had never happened—but that couldn’t erase what Shuuichi had seen. There was a story there, one that Shuuichi was growing increasingly curious to hear, and increasingly certain wouldn’t bring him joy if he was to hear it. Then, there were few joyful stories in this day and age, and even the most joyful stories of the past had turned sour with the passage of years. That was why Shuuichi had tried so hard to turn away from the past, wasn’t it?

“If you don’t think you’ll ever get anywhere with a lightsaber again, you might try practicing actively using the Force again,” was Seiji’s suggestion, “since I’m guessing you’re out of practice with that as well.”

Any concern Shuuichi had for Seiji got put on the back burner pretty quickly after that. “Forget it, Seiji,” he told him brusquely. “I’d rather focus on cultivating skills that actually help me at staying _alive_.” Shuuichi resisted the urge to add that what he had done to stay alive these past ten years was none of Seiji’s business.

“Sparring it is, then,” Seiji said, too evenly.

As Shuuichi stormed out of the cargo hold, he could feel Seiji’s stare on his back.

-0-0-0-

That night (according to the ship’s chronometer, anyway), Shuuichi climbed down from his bunk to get some water from the galley. As he did so, he paused and looked back at his ‘roommate.’

Seiji slept on his right side, his back pressed up against the wall. It was too dark in the cabin to tell whether in sleep he was relaxed or tense, but either way, Shuuichi felt a sharp spike of sympathy for him. He didn’t like the way Seiji kept trying to push the past on him, but at the same time, Seiji wasn’t the only one who seemed to prefer sleeping with his back pressed firmly against a solid wall, and Shuuichi knew all too well the kinds of experiences that could lead to it. It didn’t pay to put yourself in a situation where you could be easily startled.

The next morning, Shuuichi sat down beside Seiji at the galley table for breakfast, not realizing at first that he’d sat down at Seiji’s right side and not his left. Seiji usually either sat at the far right end of the table or asked the others not to sit on that side of him if he wasn’t, but he was scarfing down food like it would be taken away from him the same as he did every morning, and seemed not to have noticed this time. Kal was passing out water, and when Shuuichi tried to pass a glass over to Seiji, Seiji jumped in surprise, his face paling momentarily before he realized what he was being handed.

 _Well, that was stupid._ Embarrassed, Shuuichi opened his mouth to apologize, but before he could say a word, Seiji smiled at him. It wasn’t the sharp, caustic smile that Shuuichi had seen so often since Seiji had joined the crew of _The Jewel of Iridonia_. It wasn’t the sunny, untroubled smile he had worn nearly constantly as an initiate. The smile he wore was worn, unexpectedly gentle, and shadowed still with what had gone just before it.

Shuuichi stared at him for what felt like an eternity, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling as he did so. It was like seeing another person—or maybe it was just the real person the Purge and a decade of life as a fugitive had made out of Matoba Seiji.

-0-0-0-

“This is why I think you should focus on relearning how to actively call on the Force.”

Yet another sparring match had ended the exact same way the others had, though this time, Shuuichi became aware of his loss when, after losing sight of Seiji in the cargo hold, he suddenly had a lightsaber blade very nearly sitting on his shoulder, and heard the familiar refrain sounding behind him. Shuuichi groaned exasperatedly and said, “I yield. Can you just leave it for once?”

“I’m being serious, Shuuichi,” Seiji replied, irritation bleeding into his voice as Shuuichi deactivated his lightsaber and went to sit on an empty durasteel crate. “You’re still using the Force unconsciously at times, but if you actively use it the Force can compensate for the limitations of your senses. Trust me on that.” Seiji reached up and ran his thumbnail over the edge of his eyepatch, his face hardening. “It has been a great aid to me in compensating for the toll that this has taken.”

Shuuichi froze. Seiji had been living on _The Jewel_ for a few weeks now, and this was only the second time Shuuichi had heard Seiji allude to the eyepatch he wore over his right eye (And the first time it had been when they were squabbling over who would get the bottom bunk, hardly a situation conducive to serious talk). Despite the fact that he still wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know too much about how Seiji had come to be wearing an eyepatch in the first place, Shuuichi knew that he might not get another opportunity like this to ask. “So… How did that happen, anyways?”

Seiji made a humming noise in the back of his throat, his left eye taking on a sudden gleam that Shuuichi wasn’t sure he liked. Then, he sat down close beside Shuuichi on his right side, likely so that Seiji could look at him without having to crane his head too much. “Shuuichi…” Seiji stared down at his folded hands, the look on his face unreadable. “…Were you ever captured by Imperial forces during the last ten years?”

 _He doesn’t mean…_ Shuuichi’s heart began to beat just a little too fast as he responded, in a voice that sounded utterly unlike his own, “No, I haven’t. I’ve had some close calls, but that’s as far as it’s gotten.”

At that, Seiji grinned mirthlessly, teeth gritted and back arched at an almost painful-looking angle. “Five years ago, I was, for a short time, a _guest_ of the Galactic Empire and one of its detention facilities. The commandant planned to use me as bait for other Jedi who had thus far escaped the Purge, but had thought first to glean as much information as he could from me.” The vicious-looking grin faded from his face, to be replaced by a terrifyingly blank stare. “He became most… _annoyed_ , when he discovered that I knew nothing of any import,” Seiji said vaguely. “After that, I was left in a detention cell to rot. The commandant had not supposed that a sixteen-year-old boy, especially not one who had been injured as I was injured, would pose much of a security risk, so I was put in a minimum-security cell. He kept my lightsaber in his office as a ‘trophy.’” Seiji spat out the last word bitterly.

“I… I imagine he regretted that.”

“Not for long,” Seiji answered coolly. Shuuichi couldn’t normally sense any emotions from him, but this time, it was all too clear—grim satisfaction mingled with fury and an old horror, memory that still rang strong and true after five years.

‘ _Revenge is not the Jedi way_ ,’ were the words that rang through Shuuichi’s mind at the first, but they seemed trivial in the times they now lived in—the Empire would certainly take revenge, even if those fighting against it didn’t, and who was there to enforce that rule, anyways? He’d not been a Jedi for years, no matter what Seiji seemed to think, and as much as Seiji’s trying to force him back into that grated, Shuuichi had no desire to spout doctrine at him just to shut him up (He supposed Seiji had yet to make him angry enough for him to want to do that).

The tale he had been told made his stomach roil. Of course Shuuichi had known that the Empire laid traps like the one Seiji detailed—perhaps that was how Seiji had been captured in the first place, by following the trail of another captured Jedi, whether living still or not. That was part of the reason Shuuichi had gone so deep into hiding. He had given little power to hope, these past ten years, and had not dared to believe that he could have freed another Jedi from their captivity; most of the time, he’d not dared to believe that they were even still alive, and had assumed instead that it was a trap with no potential reward. Neither had he wished to be captured, and watch as someone died trying to rescue him. Shuuichi wondered if Seiji had been a prisoner long enough for that to happen to him.

Shuuichi’s mind turned, as it ever did when he thought of such things, to other Jedi who had been captured by the Empire. He knew his master was dead; he had felt that death in the Force, with the severing of all bonds that death wrought. And Shuuichi had felt enough death in the first few days of the Purge, ripples, shivers, tremors more violent than any earthquake, to know that the vast majority of the Jedi, from the most venerable of Masters to initiates of most tender years, had died long ago.

But as to other survivors of the initial Purge, those who had not been slain on Kessel or Naboo, he could not say. Were there those who languished still in dark cells, long beyond any hope of rescue? Or were they all dead? Shuuichi’s stomach roiled even harder; his chest constricted. This, Shuuichi reflected, was why he didn’t like to think about it. The moment he started thinking about things like this, the moment he started feeling like this, and once he started, he was typically unable to stop.

He wished, suddenly, that he had been there. Shuuichi knew that, even if he had been with Seiji five years ago, there was little he could have done to help him—he likely would only have been killed. But he’d not been on Coruscant when the Temple was pillaged and its inhabitants slaughtered. The world had fallen apart while his back was turned, and eventually, from the wreckage had sprung Seiji—the youngest member of the Tra’cor Clan while Shuuichi was a part of it, quite possibly the only other member of their youngling clan still alive. Would it have made a difference, for both or either of them, if they had found each other five years down the line instead of ten? Seven? Nine?

This was probably the true feeling of reunion, if happiness wasn’t what Shuuichi was going to feel at finding an old friend. The inability to put the past away as he had done before, horror at coming across an old friend, finding him so thoroughly changed and knowing well what had happened to change him. Being irritated at the way that friend kept trying to force the lessons of a vanished world upon him (and insulted by the implications of it), but still wanting his company, nonetheless. He had tried so hard to renounce that vanished world, that vanished past, but the moment someone from it came back, Shuuichi ended up being drawn directly into his orbit. He couldn’t have handed him over to the past again if he wanted to.

Shuuichi pressed his fingers to the top of Seiji’s hand. “So what happened next?”

Rather than brush his hand away as Shuuichi expected him to, Seiji curled his other hand around Shuuichi’s, gripping his hand tightly. “I escaped to a small moon a few systems over,” he explained. Though Seiji’s voice was even, what Shuuichi sensed from him now was a kind of soft melancholy, the act of remembering something long since gone. Shuuichi knew that feeling well. “The people there were no friends of the Empire, and were glad to shelter someone who had been hurt by them, even a Jedi. They helped me recover from my… injury. When I found that it was easier to do things left-handed, they helped me adjust to that.” Seiji tilted his head, smiling a strange, soft little smile. “The people who sheltered me still used swords for self-defense, and in dueling when someone felt that their honor had been impugned. I picked up the finer points of fencing left-handed from them.”

Well, that would explain the irregularities Shuuichi had noticed in Seiji’s form. Only one form of lightsaber combat, Form II, was specialized for opponents who also carried a lightsaber, but aside from shape, a lightsaber and a metal sword were two very different weapons.

Shuuichi nearly cringed at the idea of having to adjust to being blinded in one eye, or losing it altogether. Prosthetics were prohibitively expensive, and there was always the danger of them being implanted with a tracking device. Even with the aid of the Force, recovering from that…

“So, were they the ones who gave you that eyepatch?” Shuuichi asked. He didn’t want to know anything more about the recovery process. He didn’t want to know how long it had been before Seiji was able to use his left hand as adeptly as his right. He didn’t want to know if Seiji had stumbled about like a toddler still learning how to walk, or if using the Force had kept things from coming to that even at the beginning.

Seiji nodded. “Yes, they were.” His smile took on a sharp, ironic edge. “Apparently, the symbols are a talisman supposed to ward off evil.”

Somehow, Shuuichi doubted the talisman had done its job particularly well in the past five years.

And there was something else.

“You were happy with them.”

“Fairly.”

“So why didn’t you _stay_ with them?”

“Well…” Seiji tilted his head downwards, his grasp on Shuuichi’s hand tightening all the while. All of a sudden, he stopped broadcasting; Shuuichi could sense nothing from him now, and his voice told nothing of his emotions. “The Empire does make it its business to hunt down Jedi.”

Shuuichi felt a little sick. “Oh.”

They sat in silence for a long while. Shuuichi could hear the muffled sounds of someone arguing elsewhere in the ship. His pulse raced.

He remembered the last time he had been especially close to anyone, as much as he tried not to. As much as Takuma’s tendency to shelter him had worn on Shuuichi, he had cared about him, had enjoyed the time they spent together. The clone troopers as well, especially Commander Miles. If things hadn’t gone the way they had, Miles might have retired by now like he’d talked about doing. There was a good chance that Takuma _still_ would have been arguing with the Council about policy he didn’t agree with. Shuuichi himself probably wouldn’t have been a Knight by now—the Council had been speeding up the promotion of Padawans during the war, but there was no reason for them to hold on to that once the war was over—but he’d have been but a few years from it. The same went for Seiji as well. The galaxy would have been at peace again.

But that wasn’t the way things had gone. Miles and the other clones, it was like someone had flipped a switch in their brains, and they had attacked Shuuichi and his master as though they hadn’t even known them. Takuma was dead, the Order was gone, and war had been replaced by tyranny thinly veiled as ‘peace.’ Seiji had lost the use of an eye in that ‘peace’ and had turned strange after ten years of fleeing the Empire. Shuuichi had only tried to forget, but memory had proved too strong of late.

“I didn’t expect to see you again,” Seiji murmured. “I…” He paused, his brow furrowed. When he looked back up at Shuuichi, there was a rather strained look on his face. “I missed you.”

‘I missed you too,’ Shuuichi wanted to say. ‘I missed you too. I missed hearing a voice I recognized, a voice with a Core Worlds accent that didn’t belong to an Imperial officer. I even missed how obnoxious you could be as a kid—and you definitely didn’t get less obnoxious as an adult.’ But what came out instead was “I thought you were dead.”

Seiji stared down his nose at him. “Oh, really? Have you so little faith in me?”

“You were _eleven_.”

“And you were twelve. I never used your age at the beginning of the Purge as a reason not to believe you’d survived. The galaxy is fully of surprises,” Seiji pointed out, using a phrase they had both heard Master Yoda say multiple times.

Shuuichi twisted his mouth in a grimace. “There are some that’re pretty remote,” he muttered.

Seiji smiled sharply, but without the stretched quality his sharper smiles usually had. He finally relaxed his grip on Shuuichi’s hand a little, but did not let go. Shuuichi found that he didn’t mind that. “Maybe we should just be glad there are some that aren’t totally beyond reach.”

Maybe. But if there was one thing Shuuichi knew, it was that anything pleasant was inevitably tainted with the reality of what the galaxy had been made.

-0-0-0-

Seiji was no stranger to danger; the life he’d lived could hardly be called ‘safe.’ He had become a Padawan in times of intergalactic war, and since then he had been on his share of perilous missions as a smuggler, bodyguard or whatever it was he was doing at the time to earn a living. He’d learned not to bat an eye at injuries unless they were life-threatening or would impede him or others in escaping.

Funny how easily what’d learned had eluded him in this case.

Sitting on the bed in the ship’s tiny medical bay, buttoning his shirt back up and wincing when he turned his arm wrong, Shuuichi looked up and glared at him, albeit not with quite the same heat he did at other times. “Are you going to come in and say something, or are you just going to stand in the doorway the whole time?” he asked, eyeing Seiji almost cagily.

Seiji slipped into the room, but leaned up against the wall instead of going to where Shuuichi sat. He stared at him, frowning.

The mission had been the same as any Seiji had been on since joining up with this ship (This was easily the longest he had ever been with the same ship and crew). They were delivering medical supplies to an especially community on a planet under the Imperial chokehold for previous offenses committed against the state. All had gone quietly, something Seiji was grateful for (he wouldn’t shy away from a fight with the Empire, but neither did he have any desire to get kicked off this ship, too; he knew Shuuichi wouldn’t follow him, if it came to that), up until the end. Stormtroopers showed up, apparently aware that they were coming, and the typical firefight had ensued. The crew had gotten out mostly unscathed, but not entirely.

It was a grazing shot, not head-on. The worst Shuuichi seemed to be dealing with was burning from the blaster bolt, and there was a bacta patch strapped onto his arm for that. The injury was far less serious than many Seiji had either seen or had to recover from himself. It shouldn’t have bothered him. And yet…

“You didn’t move out of the way fast enough,” he said quietly.

Shuuichi’s shoulders stiffened. “A lot of people were shooting, Seiji. It’s a bit hard to get out of the way of all of them at once. _Especially_ when you’re covering for other people,” Shuuichi added pointedly. He raked a hand through his hair, still looking at Seiji as though he was going to lunge at him, or something like that.

As it was, Seiji smiled, the muscles in his face twisting almost painfully as he did so. “Maybe. I would have expected better from you, though.”

Shuuichi didn’t bite out a rapid, defensive retort as he usually did. Instead, he stared off to one side with a hard look on his face. “People change in ten years, Seiji. I would have thought you’d figured that out by now.”

_Yes, I’ve noticed._

Seiji had tried not to change much over the past decade. That would have been the final defeat, greater than death, if living under the knife was enough of a threat to make him abandon himself in order to seek safety. He liked to think that he hadn’t changed too much, that he hadn’t cut away too much of himself in the process of escaping the Imperial dragnets and trying to make a life for himself, however meager that life might have been. He was not whole in body, but that… That… was a small thing, surely, to have suffered in the attempt not to abandon everything he had known before the galaxy was upended around him. It had been worth it, surely.

(He still started sometimes, though, when he caught his reflection in glass or the polished hull of a ship. There was his face, slightly gaunt and obscured on the right side with hair and cloth, and sometimes, it didn’t look like his face at all. The feeling usually passed in a few moments, but Seiji wished he never felt like that at all.)

Shuuichi, though, Shuuichi seemed at times to have forgotten everything, forsaken everything. Bits and pieces he remembered, but the glimpses Seiji caught of the old saddened him, and the new… He didn’t know what to feel about the new. Ambivalent, maybe. He was struck always with the urge to watch Shuuichi, sometimes to see what there was left of him from their days on Coruscant and what there was that had grown up in him since then. Sometimes, he didn’t have a reason. Seiji just caught himself staring. The latter was the case now, with him examining Shuuichi’s profile and the bend of his neck pensively.

Shuuichi himself was hardly dumb to Seiji’s watching (This time, anyways). He looked back up at him, a faintly uncomfortable look passing over his face. “Come sit down,” Shuuichi said, nodding at the empty space beside him on the bed.

“Oh? I’d gotten the impression that you wanted me to leave.”

The look Shuuichi directed at him was almost pained. “ _Seiji_.”

Seiji sat down on Shuuichi’s right side. The bacta patch strapped to his arm produced a slight bulge under his sleeve; it was easy to pick out. He prodded at it with his fingertips and tilted his head slightly, brow furrowed. “Does it hurt much?”

“It does when you poke it,” Shuuichi retorted, batting his hand away. “Otherwise?” Any heat bled out of his voice. “No, not really.”

“Hmm.” Seiji stared intently at Shuuichi’s face, leaning closer to him as he did so. “You’ve… never told me how long you’ve been doing this,” he remarked.

“I’ve been with this ship for about nine months now. As to the work, I… Well, I take what work I can get,” Shuuichi added, and there at last was the defensive note that Seiji was so used to hearing from him. “And it’s not always _nice_ work, but it’s not like I’ve had a whole lot of choice.” The defensive note in Shuuichi’s voice deepened; he hunched his shoulders, his jaw set in what Seiji thought was a decidedly unhappy line.

Seiji nodded. “It’s been much the same for me. I’ve rarely been able to stay in the same place for more than a month or so.” And even when he had, he’d been forced to leave eventually. Seiji tugged at the edge of his eyepatch, frowning slightly. However pleasant it might have been stay on that moon for as long as he wanted to, it had ended all too quickly. The moon where he recovered, that was not a place he could return to. “Do you… ever want to return to Coruscant?”

Shuuichi paused for a moment, his jaw still set. “No,” he said abruptly, not looking at Seiji. Seiji picked up a hint of disquiet further down, a flicker like a guttering candle flame, but nothing more. “I like being alive too much to head there.”

“I see.”

He would have liked to return to Coruscant. The call of the Living Force was stronger (in Seiji’s mind, anyways) on other planets, planets where nature had not been subjugated to the whim of sapients, but nowhere had been home since Coruscant. Nowhere had been home since the Jedi Temple there. Seiji knew the truth—the Galactic Core was a death trap for Jedi, and their Temple had been converted to the Imperial Palace Complex. If ever he set foot there again, he’d not recognize home for what it had become. But still, that couldn’t erase the longing to be home.

(It didn’t matter, or rather, it shouldn’t have mattered. Jedi were citizens of the whole galaxy, not just Coruscant and the Jedi Temple; that was what Seiji had been taught. He was never supposed to be attached to any one planet to the point of calling it home. In all honesty, the place where he had been raised was gone, but he had no home, and had never had one. Funny how the loss of any safe haven still stung so keenly.)

“Do you remember when we were initiates?” Seiji asked quietly, staring ever more intently at Shuuichi’s face. “Some of our minders would take our youngling clan out into the city from time to time when they wanted us to know more about Coruscant and the people who lived there. You and I wandered off from our group one day—I don’t remember how old we were, but it was several years before we became Padawans. We wandered around the city for hours trying to find our way back to the Temple, and it never occurred to either of us to ask someone for help.” Seiji remembered well how frightened they both had been, how the streets they had walked before seemed to grow dark and unfamiliar, even threatening. But he’d known, even then, that his fear would have been far worse if he’d had to try to find his way back alone. “It was night by the time one of our caretakers found us and brought us back. Do you remember?” he asked again, his voice cracking slightly.

Shuuichi didn’t answer him for a long time. He stared blankly at the opposite wall, his shoulders and his back very stiff. He drew a deep breath. “No,” he replied. “I don’t.”

Seiji turned away.

There was no reason to stay, then. Seiji sprung up from the bed; Shuuichi tried to put a hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off. As he was leaving the medical bay, Shuuichi called to his back, “Don’t you ever wonder about our birth families? About our parents? I can’t imagine what they must have thought when the Purges started and HoloVision started smearing us. What they thought when—“ Shuuichi broke off roughly. Seiji could imagine the screwed-up, abjectly torn look on his face, but he didn’t turn round to see. He couldn’t stand the idea of seeing Shuuichi’s face, or letting Shuuichi see him. “Don’t you ever wonder about _that_?!”

“No, I don’t,” Seiji said, too lightly. He smiled bitterly. “It was never for us to wonder about life outside the Order.”

-0-0-0-

The crew of _The Jewel_ had set patterns of behavior. Shuuichi had never tried to involve himself in those behaviors, but he had noticed them whenever he walked past, as he did now. Hiiragi spent most of her time in the cockpit; if she wasn’t attending directly to ship functions she was reading a holobook or playing solitaire. The droids tended to keep out of sight when they weren’t looking after the ship; Shuuichi had never had much interest in trying to figure out where they went. Sephora was still trying to teach Rina how to play dejarik, with little success. “That move is illegal… That one, too… That one, _too_ , Rina… FLIPPING THE TABLE IS NOT AN ACCEPTED MOVE IN DEJARIK.” It was generally best not to stick around when they got like that. As Shuuichi passed by Kal’s cabin, he could faintly hear the sound of singing from behind the door.

But none of them were the people Shuuichi was looking for right now. Instead, he was looking for Seiji, who was at times almost as elusive as the droids, especially when he had wandered off to meditate. Sometimes, he would go down into the cargo hold. Sometimes, one of the gun turrets. At others, he would take refuge in one of the larger supply closets (Oddly enough, though, Seiji never meditated in the cabin he and Shuuichi shared; Shuuichi usually came across him when he was looking for something else). The ship wasn’t huge, though, so he’d turn up eventually.

As Shuuichi walked down another corridor, he stopped and frowned, rubbing at his arm. The blaster wound had finished healing the day before last; while it didn’t hurt anymore, Shuuichi was still struck with the urge to rub the spot where the burn had been. But that, he knew all too well, was the way with old aches. Long after the pain should have stopped, long after acceptance of it should have sunk in, he still did things like this—favor one side over the other, rub at the spot where an injury had been, act as though the wound had never closed and he needed to step lightly still. It wasn’t just physical injuries he did that with, it seemed.

This time, Shuuichi found Seiji sitting in one of the gun turrets, surrounded by stars, eyes shut, effectively dead to the galaxy. Shuuichi hung back, trying to drum up the courage to speak with him and feeling frankly rather angry with himself for finding himself unable to just walk up to Seiji and talk. _It shouldn’t be this hard. He already knows you’re a damned mess; he’s not gonna be shocked to hear you say it._

Seiji looked… calm. Shuuichi didn’t think he’d seen him look calm in the entire time they’d been together on the ship. Composed, maybe, his face masklike, but not calm, not at peace. Shuuichi felt something like a scream building up in his throat. This was all so twisted; was even momentary peace something they found so rarely that it was to stand out immediately when he saw it? Had they really come to this?

Shuuichi thought he had come to terms with this. He had told himself long ago that he was willing to give up anything and everything to stay alive, and he’d been telling himself that ever since. But with so clear a mirror to look into, he wasn’t so sure of anything he’d done anymore.

Finally sensing his observer, Seiji opened his eye and craned his neck around to get a better look at Shuuichi. He looked surprised at first, a touch uncertain, but quickly schooled his expression back to his typical even composure. “Yes?”

Shuuichi stared helplessly at him for a moment, before shaking his head and muttering, “Nothing.” He spun on his heel and started to head back for his cabin. He felt sick, but he didn’t know how he would have said it, anyways.

-0-0-0-

At night, typically the only sounds were the hum of the engines (provided _The Jewel_ was in flight and wasn’t parked in some remote field planetside) and the hum, occasionally turning to hiss of the ventilation system. If Shuuichi was awake at that time of night, he might hear footsteps and mumbled greetings as Hiiragi and Sephora changed places at the pilot’s chair.

Tonight, Shuuichi was woken to the sound of something decidedly different. Still half-asleep, he heard a thick, choking sound that it took him nearly a minute to identify as the sound of someone gagging. He was just coming into full wakefulness when the door shot open, light spilled in from the hall and Seiji rushed out, coughing incessantly.

Shuuichi climbed down from his bunk, staring out into the hallway in consternation. _What’s with him? Nightmares?_ He considered getting back into bed and behaving as though he hadn’t heard anything, but (somewhat against his better judgment) Shuuichi stood rooted to the spot, staring at the doorway.

It was several minutes before Seiji returned. When he appeared in the doorway, Shuuichi’s heart immediately sank—his face was white and drawn, his eye bloodshot, and a sheen of sweat shone on his forehead. When Seiji spotted him, he said nothing. He turned the lights in the cabin to low; the door swished shut behind him.

“Were…” Shuuichi took a step forward, eyeing him up and down with increasing concern. “Were you just…”

Seiji leaned heavily against the door, shaking his head spasmodically.  “Sick? No, no.” He straightened and drew a deep breath, but there was still that bloodshot look to his eye, still that too-hard set to his mouth. “It didn’t come to that—not this time, anyway.” He waved a hand vaguely. “I was just…”

 _He’s out of it._ Shuuichi moved forwards, just a touch cautiously, and put a bracing hand on Seiji’s shoulder. “You should go back to sleep, then. You look…”  Concern sat uneasily on his shoulders, all of a sudden; he was no one to be giving someone else comfort. _But who else is there?_

Seiji curled his hand around Shuuichi’s arm, but his grip was slack and his clammy fingers shook slightly. “Do you…” He swallowed thickly, drew another deep breath, but that wasn’t enough to give him composure, it seemed. “…Do you wonder if we’re the only ones left?”

Shuuichi’s heart started hammering in his chest. He drew back from Seiji and looked down at the ground; he could still feel Seiji’s gaze burning into the top of his head. “No, I don’t,” he muttered, ignoring every night he ever _had_ spent wondering. “It’s not worth it.”

“’Not worth it?’” A shaky laugh hit the air, high-pitched and disbelieving. “That’s just the way with you, isn’t it?” The tone of Seiji’s voice turned accusatory.

Shuuichi’s head shot back up. He stared incredulously at Seiji. “And what’s _that_ supposed to mean?” he demanded.

Seiji’s eye gleamed keenly in the shadows. The smile he flashed at Shuuichi was a chilly one—though in this light, it looked more like he had simply bared his teeth (And that might well have been what he had actually done). “Well, you abandoned everything so quickly, didn’t you? It was, what, a year before you caved under the pressure? Forsook everything.” He drew a hissing breath from between his gritted teeth. “Forgot everything. I’m hardly surprised you don’t put much thought into it.”

“Seiji…” Shuuichi gaped at him, struggling for words. His stomach was churning so badly he thought he might be sick. His mouth went very dry. When he finally managed to speak, he said, unevenly, “I was trying not to get shot or end up on Mustafar. I was trying to stay alive. I was trying to _survive_.”

“And for _that_ you gave up everything that made you what you were?”

“Well it’s a lot easier to stay alive when you don’t walk and talk like the Empire’s Most Wanted! Look at you!” Shuuichi gestured agitatedly at Seiji, who stiffened. “You got your eye cut out of your head doing things your way! How is that better?! What’s the point of trying to stay alive if you don’t keep yourself safe?!”

Seiji stared coldly at him. “What’s the point of staying alive if you throw away everything the Order gave you?” His eye narrowed. “If you stop being a Jedi?”

“You’re one to talk about that,” Shuuichi snapped back at him. His blood was still pounding in his ears; he didn’t want to talk about this, didn’t want to talk about this at all, not at all, but the words spilled from his mouth faster than he could stop them. “Oh, yes, you stood fast to the Jedi way, but Jedi aren’t supposed to show any attachment to the past, _are they_?” Seiji looked away from him at that, folding his arms across his chest defensively, but Shuuichi went on, “You were right. We had no life outside of the Order; no friends, no loved ones, and our families wouldn’t recognize us if we showed up on their doorsteps with our birth certificates. After everything that’s happened, they probably wouldn’t have us. So we only had the Order. But the Order is _gone_ , Seiji. It’s gone. Everyone we knew is gone. A Jedi is supposed to live for the future; well there was our future, and it went up in smoke!” Shuuichi’s voice cracked. He swallowed hard on a knot forming in his throat. “So what was I supposed to have done?”

To this, Seiji had no answer, it seemed. He stared off to one side, his hair falling over his face, his ragged breathing so loud that Shuuichi could hear it from across the room. Shuuichi stared at him, his blood still pounding in his ears, trying to guess if Seiji had any idea what he would have given if it would have meant that he didn’t have to be alone over the past ten years. It had been… Shuuichi couldn’t imagine what it would have been like if they could have been together all this time, or even part of it, but surely it would have been better. Anything would have been better than outrunning stormtrooopers, sleeping on cargo hold floors, scrounging for food, dodging bounty hunters and Inquisitors and the frightened people who had once seen Jedi as their protectors on his own. Maybe the constant miasma of fear would have been a little lesser. Maybe he would have chosen differently. (Maybe he wouldn’t have.)

It must have been the same for Seiji. Shuuichi had seen the shadow of old fear on his face too many times to imagine that he hadn’t ever thought the same thing. But could Seiji even see that in him at all? He had set himself to forcing Shuuichi to justify the choices he had made to him, the choices he had made when he was a child trying to defend himself against the whole galaxy. _Does he really think I was_ happy _throwing everything away? What, just because I didn’t cling to everything and risk life and limb doing it?_ Another knot formed in his throat and he swallowed down on it, angry with himself and feeling increasingly sick.

 _Everything we lost, the future we lost, and he thinks… I never wanted any of this._ Shuuichi felt like screaming, just a bit, but his jaw wouldn’t move. _I never wanted to see the things that I’ve seen… or do the things that I’ve done. You must know that._

_Surely…_

“Shuuichi.” Seiji’s voice cut the air like a knife. “Catch.”

Before Shuuichi could speak, Seiji threw his lightsaber hilt to him, too high so that Shuuichi had to throw up his hands to keep it from hitting him in the face. When he caught his bearings, Seiji was clipping his own lightsaber to his belt. “Are you _serious_?” Shuuichi demanded disbelievingly.

Seiji looked at him with an odd, unreadable look in his eye. “Yes,” he said simply.

Shuuichi wanted to protest, but all will to protest died in his throat. “I don’t think I could have gone back to sleep, anyways,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck.

Neither one of them were at their best. Both were tired. Shuuichi had to fight to keep his focus on the match; his arms felt like lead and his eyes strained against the deep shadows in the cargo hold. His mind kept going to every training match he’d had in the Temple, how every last move that should have been second nature to him was something he had to consciously remind himself of now and he wasn’t even sure if it was his exhaustion, the blood pounding in his ears or if more memories were slipping away from him with each stroke of the lightsaber. Seiji showed noticeable signs of fatigue too. His moves were sluggish and sloppy; sweat dripped down from his forehead. He practically stumbled over his feet a couple of times. The look in his eye was less that of the duelist who’d initiated the match and more someone who’d gotten caught in the fight and was just trying to end it.

Finally, Shuuichi spotted an opening. Seiji kept backing up towards the wall; if Shuuichi could catch him off balance for just a moment… He switched his lightsaber to his left hand and pressed forward.

It shouldn’t have worked. Seiji rarely seemed to realize how close to the wall he was getting during sparring matches, but the few times Shuuichi almost managed to pin him there, he slipped away, too quick for one who hadn’t used his lightsaber in close to a decade. It shouldn’t have worked.

But this time, it did. His right hand free, Shuuichi shoved Seiji up against the wall of the cargo hold, pressing against his wrist until Seiji let his lightsaber fall. He put his own lightsaber to Seiji’s throat, so close that he had to tip his head back away from it.

“I yield,” Seiji said tonelessly, his face ghastly in the green glow of Shuuichi’s lightsaber.

Shuuichi barely heard him at first. But after a long moment, he deactivated his lightsaber and let it clatter to the floor. This…

The shadows largely obscured Seiji’s face, but Shuuichi could see the look on his face, tired and uncertain. A little sad, maybe, but sadness passed from his face as it always did, so quick that Shuuichi couldn’t be sure what he’d seen at all. His gaze still managed to burn. Shuuichi felt like his stomach was twisting itself into knots.

Shuuichi leaned in and kissed him, his heart hammering. Seiji made a surprised noise at the back of his throat, but didn’t push him away. He dug his free hand into Shuuichi’s shoulder, fingernails biting into skin even through his shirt.

When he pulled away, Seiji opened his mouth as if to say something, but clamped it shut instead, still wearing that tired, uncertain look.

Suddenly, the weight and cares of the last ten years seemed to crash down on Shuuichi all at once.  His vision blurred; he drew in a shuddering breath. Then, almost before he knew what he was doing, he grabbed Seiji’s shirt in his hands, sobbing miserably.


End file.
